Washington: Before our eyes, the candidate morphs into the defendant as his campaign outings acquire an air of what Law & Order aficionados would call a "perp walk" - and maybe he should retain a good lawyer because, when it comes to the law, critics say he doesn't have a clue.
Think of it all as another peculiar twist by a peculiar candidate in a peculiar presidential campaign - Donald Trump bills himself as the law-and-order candidate, and pointing one of those famous fingers, he told his opponent Hillary Clinton that, if elected, he'll be putting her in the slammer.
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Trump promises to make America safe again. But it becomes a hard sell as voters come to terms with a video in which he seemingly confesses to being a sexual predator, an ever-expanding catalogue of his alleged sexual assaults and university rip-offs, his questionable charitable foundation and his serial stiffing of contractors, all of which raise questions about the Republican candidate's respect for the law.
An even bigger question is Trump's understanding of the law. His threat to jail Clinton earned swift rebukes from the left and right.
It was a bridge too far even for Michael Mukasey, attorney-general in the George W. Bush administration and a strident Clinton critic, who nonetheless warned that the US under a president Trump would be a "banana republic".
"[It's] something we don't do here," he said.
Former Obama administration attorney-general Eric Holder unleashed a Twitter storm, including this history-informed smackdown of Trump's inability to grasp the independence of the Attorney-General's office: "So [Donald Trump] will ORDER his AG to take certain actions - when Nixon tried that his AG courageously resigned. Trump dangerous/unfit."
Early in the campaign, an unstoppable Trump seemed on a glide path to the White House, holding up in the polls as long as allegations against him fell into that more acceptable legal rubric of white-collar crime. But now he's in free fall, in a polling hole, since his admission of sexual assault spurred the emergence of the Trump Nine, women from across the country who have nothing in common except for their remarkably similar stories of how Trump lunged at them.
![Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday.](/web/20161023103849im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/5/c/i/7/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs5id5.png/1476871948828.jpg)
Trump has little regard for due process and the notion of innocence until guilt is proven - unless it's about him. Remember his rallying calls: Mexicans are rapists and murderers, Muslims are suspect and the women who claimed he abused them are "horrible, horrible liars".
Despite the charges stacking up, Trump insists he is innocent on all counts, a legal luxury he still slavishly denies to five young men of colour, dubbed the Central Park Five, whom New York cops bludgeoned into confessing to a horrific late 1980s rape of which they were innocent; after as much as 13 years in jail, they were exonerated and received $US40 million ($52 million) in compensation when the true perpetrator was convicted and jailed for life.
![An armed police officer stands guard outside a pub in New York after a gunman attacked at a gay nightclub in Orlando, ...](/web/20161023103849im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/5/j/h/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs5id5.png/1476871948828.jpg)
This was the infamous case of the Central Park jogger - a young white woman who was raped and brutally beaten in a park that was seen as a Manhattan sanctuary. It was at the height of a crack epidemic, crime rates were soaring and racial tension was electric.
Amid a huge public outcry, Trump paid $US85,000 for a full-page ad in four city newspapers. Under the heading "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" he demanded that the alleged perpetrators, who had been arrested, be brought to justice and that the death penalty be reinstated. In a TV interview he suggested that "hate" might be a proper weapon against violent crime.
The US is safer today than at nearly any other time in modern history.
Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project
The teens' testimony had been coerced - they were denied food, water and sleep while being interrogated separately, with each being bullied into making a statement in which they admitted being at the scene but blamed the others for the crime.
The actual rapist confessed in 2002. It was his semen and DNA that were identified on the victim and her clothing and at the scene; there was no DNA evidence to link the teenagers, whom the cops had rounded up as "the usual suspects".
![Jamal Skinner, left, and Evan Aronowitz model ballistic body armour ahead of NYPD plans to distribute 20,000 helmets and ...](/web/20161023103849im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/5/j/f/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs5id5.png/1476871948828.jpg)
Furious that minority kids had finally found justice, Trump denounced the compensation payment as "a disgrace". And last week he still harped on, telling CNN: "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same."
That a bunch of black and Hispanic kids happened to be in the park on the night of the attack was good enough for Trump. None of the five had an arrest record, but Trump claimed "they don't exactly have the pasts of angels" and looking back in a subsequent tweet, he refused to accept that his argument had been well and truly debunked - claiming, well they weren't there "playing checkers".
But Sarah Burns, a co-author of The Central Park Five, counters: "So we are left with Mr Trump's presumption that because they were black and brown teenagers from Harlem, they must have committed a crime."
Clinton doesn't get a free pass in this debate. She felt the need to apologise for a $US30 billion crime bill her husband, former president Bill Clinton, signed in 1994, which critics say helped to decimate minority communities and accelerate mass incarceration, and, in particular, for her use at the time of the word "super-predators" to describe a supposedly new kind of remorseless juvenile criminal, who ultimately never emerged.
CNN commentator Van Jones was apoplectic as he joined the dots in the crime debate: "[Trump] came on the scene politically in New York City, attacking five innocent black boys, accusing them of what? Sexual assault. He never apologised! He said Mexican immigrants are rapists, sexual assaulters. [But] it turns out the sexual assaulter, the super-predator is the man running for president!"
Trump is accused of fixing on simplistic law-and-order solutions that are more about appealing to white American insecurities than about genuinely resolving social problems.
His law-and-order shtick is a straight lift from the 1960s campaign book of disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Then and now, it is read as a dog whistle appeal to white voters, a promise of "zero tolerance" policing to protect them from marauding minority crime gangs.
In 1968, Nixon insisted that "doubling the conviction rate … would do far more to cure crime in America than quadrupling" spending on poverty.
Believing the pitch still worked, Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, declaring: "Government's function is to protect society from the criminal, not the other way around."
Ellis Cose, author of The Rage of a Privileged Class and The End of Anger, claims that such policies are disingenuous.
He writes: "The law-and-order trope is inarguably potent and it fosters this wacky notion that the US is in chaos when, in fact, violent crime is lower than it has been for decades. But never mind that. The argument for getting tough on crime has never been about reducing crime; it mostly has been about fuelling racial resentments."
A study by political psychologists Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz finds the term "law and order" to be coded language that had been used effectively for decades.
"When many whites think of punitive crime policy to deal with violent offenders, they are thinking of black offenders," they write.
There is a contradiction in levels of crime and public anxiety about crime - one falls while the other rises.
But according to the Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project, the US is safer today than at nearly any other time in modern history - there are year-on-year peaks and troughs in the graphs, but property crimes, violent crime, and homicides have all plummeted over the past 25 years, nationwide.
For all that Trump says, the project is adamant in its findings about a country that has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world: "no year during the George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan presidency was as safe as 2015".
Trump is demanding national application of New York's controversial and abandoned "stop and frisk" policy, despite evidence of its inordinate impact on minority communities and expert arguments that it was ineffective in reducing crime.
It was effectively a system of rampant racial profiling, despite it proving that whites were more likely to be armed than blacks and Hispanics. In 2011, 90 per cent of those stopped were young men of colour who had done nothing wrong, and, while 1.8 per cent of them were armed, the rate of gun possession among whites that were frisked was 3.8 per cent.
Criminal justice reform activist Matt Haney argues: "Most criminologists believe that we have long passed the point where more incarceration is having any positive impact on reducing crime rates. In fact, there is more evidence of the opposite. People are less likely to commit future crimes if they don't spend time in jail."
Trump has won endorsements from unions representing hundreds of thousands of police officers and border patrolmen, but police chiefs are wary.
Early in the campaign, a coalition of police chiefs and prosecutors representing about 30,000 law-enforcement professionals wrote an open letter, in which they were scathing of Trump's "zero tolerance" policy.
"Though this may sound counter-intuitive, we know from our experience as law enforcement officials that over-relying on incarceration does not deter crime," they wrote.
"Too many resources go toward arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning low-level offenders."
Norm Stamper, a former chief of the Seattle Police Department spoke more bluntly about the letter, telling reporters: "[Trump] does not know what he's talking about, the man does not know police work.
"When he, without thinking, without researching, without developing facts, makes these assertions - for example about stop and frisk - not only is he fuelling racism, he taps into a really ineffective and unconstitutional police tactic."
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